Fiction is a branch of neurology
November 16, 2012 § Leave a comment
When I started making records, the model of economic exchange was exceedingly simple: make something, price it for more than it costs to manufacture, and sell it if you can. It was industrial capitalism, on a 7″ scale. The model now seems closer to financial speculation. Pandora and Spotify are not selling goods; they are selling access, a piece of the action. Sign on, and we’ll all benefit. (I’m struck by the way that even crowd-sourcing mimics this “investment” model of contemporary capitalism: You buy in to what doesn’t yet exist.)
But here’s the rub: Pandora and Spotify are not earning any income from their services, either. In the first quarter of 2012, Pandora– the same company that paid Galaxie 500 a total of $1.21 for their use of “Tugboat”– reported a net loss of more than $20 million dollars. As for Spotify, their latest annual report revealed a loss in 2011 of $56 million.
Leaving aside why these companies are bothering to chisel hundredths of a cent from already ridiculously low “royalties,” or paying lobbyists to work a bill through Congress that would lower those rates even further– let’s instead ask a question they themselves might consider relevant: Why are they in business at all?
The answer is capital, which is what Pandora and Spotify have and what they generate. These aren’t record companies– they don’t make records, or anything else; apparently not even income. They exist to attract speculative capital. And for those who have a claim to ownership of that capital, they are earning millions– in 2012, Pandora’s executives sold $63 million of personal stock in the company. Or as Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek has put it, “The question of when we’ll be profitable actually feels irrelevant. Our focus is all on growth. That is priority one, two, three, four and five.”
Growth of the music business? I think not. Daniel Ek means growth of his company, i.e., its capitalization. Which is the closest I can come to understanding the fundamental change I’ve witnessed in the music industry, from my first LP in 1988 to the one I am working on now. In between, the sale of recorded music has become irrelevant to the dominant business models I have to contend with as a working musician. Indeed, music itself seems to be irrelevant to these businesses– it is just another form of information, the same as any other that might entice us to click a link or a buy button on a stock exchange. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: I(O)=◎
What you’re saying is, ‘Commit more fraud because that’s the GDP of Britain: bank fraud… We’re going to impose a fine on you Barclays so go out there and commit fraud more rapidly so that the GDP of the country goes up.’
November 15, 2012 § Leave a comment
It began, an idea without a name, in the quiet of Rachel Whiteread’s studio in East London. And it ended several years later, a sculpture called House, demolished in the full glare of the world’s media. House always had the potential to be a contentious work of art. But in my first conversations with Rachel Whiteread in the summer of 1991, it was impossible to imagine that it would be quite as exposed, quite as contentious as things turned out; and that its transition from private projection to public phenomenon would be so dramatic and so quick.
House could have been made elsewhere, in a different place, at a different time; perhaps with another cast list and chorus. Indeed, Whiteread and I had looked at several other terraced houses in North and East London through 1992 without success. At one stage, a condemned house in Islington seemed possible, but the right permissions failed to materialize. Another in Hackney was knocked down before we could make a proposal to the owner. Finally, after months of private persuasion and occasional public meetings, the councillors of Bow Neighbourhood voted by a small majority to give a temporary lease on 193 Grove Road, one of the few remaining houses in what had once been a Victorian terrace. After several months’ more waiting, Whiteread took possession and the physical making of the work began in August 1993. From that moment, House was of a specific place and a particular time. And it was this configuration of time and place, with its attendant contingencies of local and national politics and the added spice of the 1993 Turner Prize which, as much as the physical appearance of the sculpture, created the meaning of House and determined the course of its short life.
House was completed on October 25 1993. There had deliberately been almost no press until one day before. Slowly at first and then more quickly, interest and comment began to grow in the locality and beyond; in the pages of the national press and on television news. Newspaper leaders and letters, columns and cartoons appeared and multiplied. Visitors grew day by day. On November 23 two decisions were made simultaneously in different parts of London. A group of jurors at the Tate Gallery decided that Whiteread had won the 1993 Turner Prize, and a gathering of Bow Neighbourhood Councillors voted that House should be demolished with immediate effect. It was an incendiary combination. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Brittany Markert
Writing a novel about a man who leaves his wife and three children and goes to live alone on the other side of London to write a novel about a man who leaves his wife and three children
November 14, 2012 § Leave a comment
When the Fed buys assets, it purchases them by crediting banks with reserves. So the result of QE is that the Fed’s balance sheet grows rapidly—to, literally, trillions of dollars. At the same time, banks exchange the assets they are selling (the Treasuries and MBSs that the Fed is buying) for credits to their reserves held at the Fed. Normally, banks try to minimize reserve holdings—to what they need to cover payments clearing (banks clear accounts with one another using reserves) as well as Fed-imposed required reserve ratios. With QE, the banks have ended up with humongous quantities of excess reserves.
As we said, normally banks would not hold excess reserves voluntarily—reserves used to earn zero, so banks would try to lend them out in the fed funds market (to other banks). But in the ZIRP environment, they can’t get any return on lending reserves. Further, the Fed switched policy in the aftermath of the crisis so that it now pays a small, positive return on reserves. So the banks are holding the excess reserves and the Fed credits them with a bit of interest. They aren’t thrilled with that but there’s nothing they can do: the Fed offers them a price they cannot refuse on the Treasuries and MBSs it wants to buy, and they get stuck with the reserves.
A lot of people—including policy makers—exhort the banks to “lend out the reserves” on the notion that this would “get the economy going”. There are two problems with that. First, banks can lend reserves only to other banks—and all the other banks have exactly the same problem: too many reserves. A bank cannot lend reserves to your household or firm. You do not have an account at the Fed, so there is no operational maneuver that would allow you to borrow the reserves (when a bank lends reserves to another bank, the Fed debits the lending bank’s reserves and credits the borrowing bank’s reserves). Unless you are a bank, you cannot borrow them.
The second problem is that banks don’t need reserves in order to lend. What they need is good, willing, and credit-worthy borrowers. That is what is sadly lacking. Those who are credit-worthy are not willing; those who are willing are mostly not credit-worthy.
And we should be glad that banks are not currently lending to the uncredit-worthy. Here’s why: that’s what got us into this mess in the first place. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: zerenga
Little things, like my apartment, my possessions. I should get one of those signs that says, ‘One of These Days I’m Going to Get Organeziezd.’
November 13, 2012 § Leave a comment
Krapp’s Last Tape (2006)
Duration: 52 minutes
An extraordinary study of mortality, creativity and memory. A 69-year-old man sits alone on his birthday and listens to recordings of his past. A rare chance to see the sell out performance of Samuel Beckett’s critically acclaimed play, starring Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter. watch
ART: Muzonaz, after ABe Yoshitoshi
Greek debt unsustainable, says Rehn, who rules out restructuring
November 12, 2012 § Leave a comment
Somewhere, in some book or other, I really can’t remember which, I wrote the sentence ‘Everything passes, but nothing entirely goes away.’ Or possibly ‘Everything passes, but nothing entirely disappears.’ It had a context. I imagine it was to do with the nature of personal history, trauma or pleasure, either. It referred casually to psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious. And also commented on the banality of the ‘everything passes’ cliché. It wasn’t a sentence on its own. No sentence ought to be. I’ve been writing a daily #todaysrandomreading on Twitter recently, but the point is that it is random, and not intended to offer meaning or wisdom. I’m an aficionado of pointlessness.
Now, I keep seeing it quoted on Twitter and in blogs, in various languages, as if it belonged in the Big Book of Deathless Truths. Everything passes, but that sentence doesn’t entirely go away. I am deeply embarrassed for myself whenever I see it. While I’m pretty sure I thought about it as I wrote it in, as I say, context, it’s a cloud of airy nothing put out there on its own. Like a scrap of a torn shirt carefully washed and hung out to dry, to be clean and useless. I hate homilies. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Yagi Takaharu
You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good
November 9, 2012 § Leave a comment
If you were born in rural England in 1837 and never travelled more than a few miles from your home, you would have been surprisingly likely to see a hippopotamus before you died.
The reign of Queen Victoria saw a surge in the construction of all manner of places where exotic animals could be viewed.
And as well as formal, educational settings – private and public zoos, natural history museums – the period brought animals for entertainment to the masses. Travelling menageries would tour towns and cities, featuring performers and their animals.
Or, if you were sufficiently interested (and wealthy), you could simply buy your own tiger or boa constrictor in a shop.
Most exotic pet shops were in London – by 1895 there were 118 wild animal dealers in London alone – but there were also shops in Liverpool, Bath and Bristol.
People could walk into a shop and purchase anything, from an elephant to a bear to a kangaroo.
And the greater politics of the British Empire drove this burgeoning industry into the rest of Europe.
Before the Suez Canal was built, for example, almost every ship coming from Asia or Africa touched land first in England. After it was built, Germany steadily overtook the UK in “the scramble for elephants”. read more
ART: Michaël Borremans
I thought it would look good to have a violin case as part of my baggage; that’s why I got it
November 8, 2012 § Leave a comment
Enlightenment colonial merchants were unable to reconcile encounters with non-Europeans for whom some objects were not for sale at any price. These merchants had a deep belief that all things were commensurable through market exchange value. So, “… in insisting that certain goods not be commodified,… Africans were exposing as fictive all claims for the universality and naturalness of the European market-economy.” Europeans invented the fetish “to mask the absence of market-values among Africans.” Idol-worship was something that people of the Judeo-Christian Bible could understand, and judge. Marx, however, ironically reverses the charge, characterizing the Enlightened Europeans as idolators – fetishists in their barbarous devotion to material commodities and the thoroughly immaterial value they represent.
The West’s enduring fascination with zombies has a great deal to do with its culture industry – especially movies. But most contemporary Western productions, McNally argues, are “pale substitutes, faint and distorted after-images of the monsters we deny.” They may on occasion have a satirical anti-consumerist message, but what they crucially lack for David McNally is an anti-capitalist message. Indeed, McNally traces the zombie to West Africa by way of 18th century Haiti where slaves transformed a pre-capitalist religious idea (of the dead arising to help or harm the living) into the idea that coerced mindless labor is a kind of living death. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Ei Toshinari
It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is
November 7, 2012 § Leave a comment
Literature cannot meaningfully be treated as data. The problem is essential rather than superficial: literature is not data. Literature is the opposite of data.
Data precedes written literature. The first Sumerian examples of written language are recordings of beer and barley orders. But The Epic of Gilgamesh, the first story, is the story of “the man who saw the deep,” a hero who has contact with the ineffable. The very first work of surviving literature is on the subject of what can’t be processed as information, what transcends data.
The first problem is that literature is terminally incomplete. You can record every baseball statistic. You can record every trade over the course of a year. You can work out the trillions of permutations and combinations available on a chessboard. You can even establish a complete database for all of the legislation and case law in the world. But you cannot know even most of literature, even English literature. Huge swaths of the tradition are absent or in ruins. Among the first Anglo-Saxon poems, from the eighth century, is “The Ruin,” a powerful testament to the brokenness inherent in civilization. Its opening lines:
The masonry is wondrous; fates broke it
The courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying.
The poem comes from the Exeter Book of Anglo-Saxon poetry and several key lines have been destroyed by damp. So, one of the original poems in the English lyric tradition contains, in its very physical existence, a comment on the fragility of the codex as a mode of transmission. The original poem about a ruin is itself a ruin.
Literature is haunted by such oblivion, by incipient decay. The information we have about the past is, in almost every case, fragmentary. There are always masses of data which are simply missing or which cannot be untangled. The most obvious and relevant example is Shakespeare. There are nine different versions of Richard III; there are three versions of Hamlet, each with missing sections or added sections. There are missing plays. Cardenio. Love’s Labour’s Won. They no longer exist. So even the work of Shakespeare, which has been scrupulously attended to by generations of scholars, cannot be completely described. Literature is irredeemably broken and messy. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Nicky Peacock
This is the shining grudge of numbers
November 6, 2012 § Leave a comment
This is an era of CGI end-times porn, but London’s destructions, dreamed-up and real, started a long time ago. It’s been drowned, ruined by war, overgrown, burned up, split in two, filled with hungry dead. Endlessly emptied.
In the Regency lines of Pimlico is Victorian apocalypse. Where a great prison once was, Tate Britain shows vast, awesome vulgarities, the infernoward-tumbling cities of John Martin, hybrid visionary and spiv. But tucked amid his kitsch 19th Century brilliance are stranger imaginings. His older brother Jonathan’s dissident visions were unmediated by John’s showmanship or formal expertise. In 1829, obeying the Godly edict he could hear clearly, Jonathan set York Minster alight and watched it burn. From Bedlam – he did not hang – he saw out his life drawing work after astonishing work of warning and catastrophe…
‘London’s Overthrow’. Scrappy, chaotic, inexpert, astounding. Pen-and-ink scrawl of the city shattered under a fusillade from Heaven, rampaged through by armies, mobs, strange vengeance. Watching, looming in the burning sky, a lion. It is traumatized and hurt.
The lion is an emblem too
that England stands upon one foot.
With the urgency of the touched, Martin explains his own metaphors.
and that has lost one Toe
Therefore long it cannot stand
The lion looks out from its apocalypse at the scrag-end of 2011. London, buffeted by economic catastrophe, vastly reconfigured by a sporting jamboree of militarised corporate banality, jostling with social unrest, still reeling from riots. Apocalypse is less a cliché than a truism. This place is pre-something. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Miguel Soll
The problem with our public culture is not that it is low-grade: it is that it is fluent, clear, coherent, often vividly expressed, and more or less entirely free of fresh intellectual content
November 5, 2012 § Leave a comment
The villages we visited were populated by people who spoke Bembe, a Bantu language. My interpreter spoke Bembe fluently. Not all of our interpreters did. Swahili, another Bantu language used as a lingua franca across much of eastern Africa, was sometimes used in Bembe’s place. Monolinguals were sent to my interpreter, bilinguals to the Swahili-speaking interpreter. The occasional French-speaker was interviewed by our Swiss colleague. (She prized those exchanges, a rare chance to speak directly with villagers.)
At the beginning of my first interview, my interpreter asked our villager if he was ready to speak. My ears perked up in an unusual moment. He used a word I knew: tayari, “ready”. Kannada, a Dravidian language spoken in southwestern India, uses the same word for “readiness”—probably borrowed from Arabic via Persian and Hindi. Bembe probably borrowed the word from Swahili, a language that has absorbed a great deal of Arabic vocabulary through centuries of trade. How wonderfully curious, I thought, that a Kannada-speaker from the United States would have this word in common with a Bembe-speaker from one of the most remote regions in the world. I felt inspired—perhaps this interpreter bit would turn out well after all.
My readiness ended there. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Luo Yang
my nerves are bad to-night 